


The Tale of Highway 380

by kalypsobean



Category: The Hitcher (2007)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-26
Updated: 2015-10-26
Packaged: 2018-04-28 06:52:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5081912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalypsobean/pseuds/kalypsobean
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>They say that if you drive on the highway at night, when it's true dark, when it's raining, and all you want to do is get where you're going, a man will appear in the road in front of you. </i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Tale of Highway 380

There's a story about Highway 380, mostly forgotten now, but it still exists; it is passed down by locals as a story to scare the children into staying indoors when it is dark. The few travellers who listen, when they stop in for gas or a meal, are warned, but the young ones are now more ready to believe in aliens and war than they are the dangers that lie on the road, the ones that grew with the earth and are quiet except when they are not.

 

They say that if you drive on the highway at night, when it's true dark, when it's raining, and all you want to do is get where you're going, a man will appear in the road in front of you. He will be wet and cold, and if you stop, he'll ask you for a ride. He has an accent that nobody can quite place - sometimes he's British, sometimes he's Southern, sometimes he doesn't speak at all - but he's always a man, always just that bit older, always alone. They say now that he says his car broke down, and sometimes you see its lights before you see him, bright lights in the dark that blind you until you can only tell you're on the road from the way your tyres spin on the wet. 

Of course, some people let him in their cars, talk to him about family and dreams and destinations. The ones who survived don't say much; they're found with their own blood on their hands as their necks pulse with the last of it, and if they're the last, then they had to watch the rest die as they could do nothing. 

But even if you listened to your mother, and to the police who came to school and drilled you on stranger danger until you were telling your own children to stay inside years later without knowing why, and you drive past, promising yourself you'll call a tow truck or 911 just as soon as your phone gets reception again, it won't save you. That's when they say he chases you down, lies in wait exactly where you're going as if you told him yourself, and plays tricks on you. Then, when you've lost everything, he takes away even more, and you're left with nothing, if you're in one piece at all. They say, once, they found a boy torn in two in a motel carpark, impossibly drawn, and all that was left was his skin and bones.

 

They say that he was once a man, that he was driven mad when he was abandoned on the roadside; they say that he is the ghost of a hitchhiker who was killed for a Satanic ritual, back in the Eighties when that sort of thing was done alongside drugs that split the mind and made you believe things weren't as they seemed. They say he is borne of the earth itself and the deaths are a toll exacted in payment for our use of the land, though no Native will claim him and he is not like his European brethren, turning on us ourselves instead of turning us against each other.

 

They say the safest thing is to pull over before dusk, before even a hint of darkness, and stay the night in a motel, perhaps, or even on the side of the road, far enough away that if he is hunting he passes you by. They say it's dangerous out there at night, for the road gets slippery easily, and reception is dodgy because nobody would let them put a tower in a national park, and it's quiet enough that if you break down, nobody will find you for hours.

They say it's dangerous because the Hitcher might get you.

But that's just a fairy story, an urban legend, a campfire tale that's been mangled and twisted so much that nobody knows where it came from. That kind of thing can't be real, anyway.

Can it?

**Author's Note:**

> For Spook Me 2015, with creature prompt 'Dark Faerie'. Dark faeries are known to prey on travellers and play tricks on them and/or forcing them to do things they normally wouldn't.


End file.
